In some ways contrary to current hours of service guidance around use of "personal conveyance" for personal off-duty use of the truck by operators nationwide, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance wants the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to impose new restrictions:
- A two-hour daily hard limit on PC use.
- Express prohibition of owner-operators utilizing PC to travel to or from home.
- Prohibition, too, on PC use for drivers up against an hours of service limit to continue driving to get to a "safe haven" when no parking is available.
- Moving PC driving of the truck away from the "off duty" log line.
CVSA, "in the next several weeks," said Deputy Executive Director Adrienne Gildea, will petition FMCSA for these and other changes and guidance clarifications, following years of documentation by inspectors around the nation of PC use. Last time the alliance petitioned the agency for PC limits and clarifications, FMCSA "cited a lack of safety data" in denying the request, Gildea said. With this upcoming petition, the alliance comes with data in their back pocket.
Since June of 2021, as previously reported, CVSA has tracked incidence of what inspectors deemed "improper" PC use with a special violation code created for the False Log violation by FMCSA. Gildea said results of that tracking and subsequent analysis of crash records show that when truckers and other commercial drivers were found to have used personal conveyance, it's misused "38% of the time" and "motor carriers whose drivers misuse personal conveyance are four times more likely to be involved in a crash."
She said CVSA stakeholders feel that, with the "rise of personal conveyance misuse seen in the roadside inspection data, it is clear that additional clarity is needed."
The news comes after the May 13-15 Roadcheck inspection event keyed in on truck drivers' use of PC, in addition to other particular compliance areas.
[Related: Connecticut inspectors talk HOS, ELP enforcement at Roadcheck]
Personal conveyance restrictions have been sought before, unsuccessfully
The forthcoming petition has been in development for a long time now, "since the last one was denied" years ago, Gildea said. The CVSA board approved the final addition to it -- the two-hour-daily time limit recommendation -- at the Spring Workshop meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, just a few weeks back in late April. "We are now ready to resubmit."
The petition seeks a blanket two-hour daily limit on use of PC by a driver. Prior, similar CVSA petitions didn't request a specific limit, but rather urged either time or distance limits, the latter of which might conform to distance limits imposed in Canada. More than six in every ten owner-operators surveyed by Overdrive around such limitations rejected the notion of time/distance limits in 2022, when the last CVSA petition around personal conveyance was filed.
CVSA's upcoming petition plans to single out owner-operators specifically, asking FMCSA to "provide official written guidance that states an owner-operator cannot use personal conveyance to return home or leave home," according to Gildea.
Current language around PC on the FMCSA website allows PC use by drivers reporting to or coming home from work -- at for instance a fleet terminal or a jobsite. Given it's easy to envision situations where a truck owner-operator would be involved in work that fits the current guidance for allowable use to and from home, why single them out?
Gildea noted there's conflicting guidance from FMCSA designed specifically for enforcement personnel that "owner-operators cannot use PC when leaving home because their home is generally their terminal and they would be considered 'on-duty' when they leave their terminal/home."
She added that the alliance isn't "advocating for or against their guidance," simply "asking that they make this formal, for clarity."
[Related: 'Personal conveyance' in the hours of service: Owner-operators say no to time/distance limits]
Current guidance, adopted by FMCSA following truck driver commentary in the wake of the ELD mandate's implementation, allows off-duty travel to a safe haven to park when on-duty hours are exhausted by a shipper/receiver, or if a rest period is interrupted by law enforcement. CVSA's petition seeks to clarify that provision by asking FMCSA for "official written guidance that states it is not acceptable to continue driving after reaching an hours-of-service limit to get to a 'safe haven'" specifically "because there is no available parking," according to Gildea.
In other words, CVSA wants FMCSA to make it abundantly clear that simply looking for available parking isn't an acceptable reason to keep driving past drive- or duty-time limitations in the hours of service.
Finally, CVSA plans to ask FMCSA to prohibit "off duty" use of personal conveyance -- the customary log line utilized by truckers for PC. Gildea explained the practical outcome if that part of the petition is granted might be a special "personal use" log line for such driving, which would not be able to be utilized for the off-duty rest period. Such a move might "eliminate the incentive to use PC incorrectly," she said, "because the driver would still need to get the required rest period. The time spent in PC would not count against the driver's hours of service limitations, however it would not contribute to the required 10-hour rest period for property carrying drivers" either.
The petition will also ask for:
- Definition of the term enhancing operational readiness, used in current FMCSA guidance prohibiting PC use to describe situations when movement of the truck, for example, gets the driver closer to the next load or unload point or other scheduled destination.
- Definition of yard move. In the current logging landscape, a yard move is a mode in an electronic logging device allowing for on duty not driving movement of the truck to reposition equipment on-site, generally within a private, confined terminal or very briefly on a public road without interaction with other motorists. Definition of what more exactly and officially consitutes a "yard" and "yard move" generally has been proposed by FMCSA but not fully adopted.
- Clarifying the difference between personal use and personal conveyance terminology. Currently, FMCSA's verbiage on the PC subject generally uses "personal conveyance" to delineate a particular driving use of a commercial motor vehicle, while "personal use" is a generally undefined descriptor (except by some of the many examples the agency gives) that qualifies an acceptable use of PC.
[Related: Hours of service should be front and center in DOT deregulatory efforts: Truckers]
